INTRODUCTION

‘Madam, while appreciating your frankness,’ I gazed at her all-most revealed twin globes. ‘I would like to know the exact position you occupy in between Sati Savitri and a shameless hussy or chronic flirt.’

‘Oh …’ Her lusty lips formed an interesting oval. ‘It seems to be an awful lot of questions and I think it should be left unanswered. What do you say? Besides, I think my statement is self-explanatory.’

‘I don’t think so,’ I quipped at her. ‘Your statement is ambiguous and vague. There are lots in between Sati Savitriism and flirtation. In between these parade the Adultress, Demireps, Cocottes, Hataeras, Demi mondaine, Trollops and their respective-isms. Would you please make it clear what the category you belong to and what kind of ism yours is?’

‘No … No …’ she curtly came up. ‘I can’t say anything over that. And it’s for you to understand the matters. Certain things could not be detailed and this is one among them. That’s it and nothing more.’

‘Suppose this statement of yours reaches your husband, does that make any harm to your married life?’

‘Certainly I don’t think so! Even without hearing or knowing my statement he could know things. He is no more a kid. He is a broadminded man with a very considerate outlook and capable of knowing the legitimate demands of my profession. I’m very lucky and glad to have got him as my husband,’ she giggled.

‘And which part of your anatomy do you consider as most attractive?’

‘How can I say that? All parts of my body. I can say only that,’ she looked at her body for a while.

‘And according to your husband?’ I continued digging.

‘He loves every inch of me. But he always take high of my hurdies. I think he’s fetishist of Bottom,’ she said with a wicked gleam in her eyes.

At this time one of my friends poured cold water on my face and it woke me up from my sleep. What a lovely dream and interview it was.

(An excerpt, reproduced verbatim, from a purported
interview with Bindu, the vamp, that appeared in the
now defunct magazine Film Mirror.)

For a true fan of the movies, watching them is never enough. Reading about that other universe and its stars is part of the syndrome. The above-mentioned Film Mirror was only one of the many film magazines I read when I was growing up, and I read it sitting in the barber’s shop. That was among the few places one had access to any form of writing about popular Hindi cinema back then. The mainstream press rarely covered it, except in the weekly reviews and the occasional, anaemic interview. For news of what was really happening in Bollywood, as it was only beginning to be called, we had to turn to the film magazines that were rarely allowed into respectable middle-class homes.

And there was a whole bunch of these magazines in the 1970s, many so bold with gossip, and so unconcerned with matters of privacy and ethics, that now, thinking back, it takes my breath away (sample the excerpt above). Filmfare was the grand old lady, still published in an improbable size that meant you couldn’t open it fully in a crowded bus or train. Stardust was the snazzy newcomer with a hint of middle-class contempt for the arrivistes and outsiders that made up the film industry. Cine Blitz came later and launched itself on to the unsuspecting public with Protima Bedi—a Bollywood citizen through her open marriage with Kabir Bedi—running nude on a city beach. In between, for a brief while, there was Super, which had an almost undecipherable column, written as a letter, by Bubbles. Since Bubbles assumed we all knew the stars’ nicknames, I often read it wondering at what was really happening and who was doing what to whom. When one did know (Daboo was Randhir Kapoor and Kaka was Rajesh Khanna) one felt validated in one’s knowledge. When one didn’t know, one only thirsted to know more. So, often one knew who Bak-Bak Barkha was but one didn’t know what she did. (She was Reena Roy’s sister and hung around the edges of Bollywood. She didn’t do anything but, for years, I assumed she was another starlet.) For a few months, I thought Simple was a cruel way of referring to Dimple Kapadia until Anurodh was released. Then I discovered that a girl called Simple did in fact exist, and that Kaka had refused to put his arms around her, she being his sister-in-law. (I thought this displayed a nice sense of something, I didn’t know what that something was but it was nice. ‘Yes, I shall act with my sister-in-law as heroine but I shall have no physical contact with her,’ he must have said to the director and the producer. Perhaps that was why they gave him tuberculosis in the film.)

I read about Parveen Babi and Kabir Bedi exercising together, him in briefs and she in a bikini. I thought Devyani Chaubal often wrote more about herself than about the stars but I was still aghast when Dharmendra chased her around the Mahalaxmi Race Course when she described Hema Malini as a stale idli. I remember the tension that surrounded the Neetu Singh-Rishi Kapoor romance. Would he, wouldn’t he and what would everyone in the Kapoor Khandaan, from his mother Krishna to his driver, say? And was it true that Vinod Khanna was going to leave his sons and wife and become a gardener in the Rajneesh Ashram? (It was.)

If the 1970s were the glory years for film magazines, the 1980s came storming in with Movie, well-produced and glossy. In 1984, Showtime was launched; it was supposed to be the intelligent magazine for the discerning reader, though it started offering gossip in a few years and now seems to have become a magazine about television stars.

I read them all. I didn’t care. As long as it was about Bollywood, I was hooked. From time to time, I did remember feeling that I was being taken for a ride. Janki Dass’ column in Film Mirror is a good example. It was called ‘Dames Down Memory Lane’, and in it the veteran character actor once claimed that he had lost his chance at an Olympic medal because he had been seduced on the eve of the cycling events by a Bollywood star who had rubbed him up and down with scented unguents before having her vile way with him. Then another film magazine set up a shoot in which Vinod Khanna was mobbed by its staff, all pretending to be fans demanding autographs, so that it could claim that his popularity was overtaking Amitabh Bachchan’s.

I didn’t bother about how timely the news was. I didn’t particularly care. I could read a six-month-old magazine with as much enthusiasm as a new one. This gave me the odd but exciting feeling of living in several time zones at once. (This often happens with those who love cinema in any form. You watch a film in which Raj Kapoor is a young man. You then watch a television interview with him where he is an old man. And you know he is dead.) However, since we did not subscribe to these magazines as a family, I had to read them when I could and where I could. So while reading a Court Martial column in Stardust, I had to piece things together. From what I remembered, say, Gogo and Lulu were sworn enemies. Only in this particular Court Martial, it appeared that Gogo thought Lulu had a great sense of timing and was a superb actor. Sometimes the journalist in charge of the Court Martial would remind Gogo about the problems he had with Lulu. Gogo would say that there was no problem. The journalist would then remind Gogo about Lulu replacing him in the big banner’s forthcoming film. Gogo would say that he had turned down the film because of a ‘dates problem’. Then Gogo might add that it was all the media’s fault, that journalists were forever adding their own ‘mirch masala’ and causing trouble.

Bollywood, as it was presented in these magazines, was a wonderful space in which nothing was as it should be. There was a sense of disconnection with the real world. In the real world, the middle class rose betimes to form queues to buy milk and worried about the availability of kerosene; out there in Juhu, the stars worried only about the availability of time. Several were doing three shifts a day. (Shashi Kapoor had, after the success of Chor Machaye Shor, signed ‘more than three dozen films’. He was working on them all at once.) But we did not grudge them this difference. I remember a huge article on Rekha which claimed that she had drawn elements of her style—this was before her transformation into the Gloriana of Lip-Gloss—from such unlikely persons as Jaya Bhaduri and Zarina Wahab. This was such brilliant nonsense that you had to read it. As you had to absorb every last detail about the Bengali Tigresses at war—Sharmila Tagore and Raakhee, for those who came in late—and the sorry mess of the Asma–Dilip Kumar–Saira Banu affair.

It was because the stars led such different lives that we were so fond of them and so addicted to these magazines. I remember reading about Jeetendra sympathizing with the common man about the price of onions. He said something to the effect that it was all right for the stars but what about ordinary people? Raakhee, on the other hand, said that onions were used to sweeten curries and that there were other ways to do that. I think she suggested tomatoes but I can’t be very sure. Neither remark seemed very fitting. We did not need sympathy from the stars. Nor did we need recipes even if we all knew that Raakhee often made fish curry for the entire unit, back in the days ‘when shooting was like going on a picnic’, and ‘the industry was a different place’. What we wanted was the assurance that their world was a bright and unwholesome place. What we wanted was a validation of our morality. They were living out our fantasies and they were paying the price.

They still are. We still talk of their addictions and aspirations. We still gather at the gates of their bungalows. We still consume their words with the same mixture of contempt and hunger. This is because of and despite the fact that there is very little that is new in what we read. Anyone who has read five-star interviews will recognize Bollywood’s clichés. Every year, the stars say pretty much the same things. One of them says she has made mistakes but now wants to focus on her profession. Another says that he wants to do roles with shades of grey in them. A third says she is delighted to be working with the fourth.

We have read this before. We will read it again. The repetition cheers us. Bollywood is as it should be.

The best years of the film magazines may now be over, but there are other consolations. At this point in time, a new book on Bollywood comes out every other day. But even twenty years ago there were almost no books on Hindi commercial cinema. I remember the excitement I felt when I heard that someone had written a book on Sholay. This was in the time before the Internet, before credit cards, so my sister Andrea and I made out demand drafts and sent off letters and after some six weeks the book arrived by Book Post. It was so boring that neither of us ever finished it. Many years later, it was a relief to read Anupama Chopra’s Sholay: The Making of a Classic.

I still have that first book on Sholay. For a long time, it was shelved with all the Hollywood books I bought from the streets of Mumbai. But over the last few years, the numbers have grown dramatically and the Bollywood collection has moved from its own shelf to its own cupboard. Many of these books have deepened my understanding of the medium and how it operates. Others are just special. For instance Hanif Zaveri’s Mehmood: A Man of Many Moods (Popular Prakashan, 2005) has a list of the good people in Bollywood. It runs over a page, name after name, comma, comma, comma, full stop. It is to the editor’s credit that this got left in. Shilpa Shetty warns me never to do my face in public. Vyjayanthimala Bali says it never happened. Nothing. Ever. Happened. Read my mudras. There are now more coffee table books than I can keep track of and all of them seem to want to do either of two things: sum up the industry or uncover its seamier side. There are lists and there are fan biographies. There are academic treatises, most of which seem to be written by European women or south Indians.

I collect Bollywood books in the way other people collect stamps. The only constraints are my own impatience and the price of real estate in Mumbai. I would have liked to keep Parveen Babi’s autobiography but it was huge, at nearly 700 pages, many of which were blank. Some were emails, obviously written by the actor to herself. Many pages had a single line or two. Others had been pasted over, perhaps by her exasperated publisher. Not many of them made sense. It was a sad book, but it contained the outpourings of a very troubled woman. I only hoped, as I sent it off to the raddhiwalla, that it had given her some peace.

It was at the raddhiwallas of Mumbai, those unsung heroes of the recycling movement, that I recovered some of the best books I have. There’s Vinod Mehta’s Meena Kumari, for instance, a section of which we are proud to excerpt here. (Mehta entertains us even with his asides, which have little to do with ‘his heroine’. He describes himself as ‘a Punjabi from Lucknow’, and adds, ‘The success of his first book, Bombay: A Private View, surprised everyone but its author.’)

Of course, you can never be sure that a book will survive the market these days. At one time, it was possible to buy multiple copies of Kobita Sarkar’s You Can’t Please Everyone: Film Censorship: The Inside Story. Today, copies are rare. Similarly, at one time it was possible to buy Manohar Malgonkar’s novelization of Krishna Shah’s Shalimar at almost every street corner. Now it has vanished.

(Anyone who has seen Krishna Shah’s ambitious bilingual film will know that it is impossible to convert it into a novel. Its status as a cult classic of truly bizarre filmmaking rests on those wonderful sequences such as the early one in which Dolly—Aruna Irani— forces the dancers in her dance class to continue moving to One two cha cha cha while a gambler has a heart attack and dies. Or the song Hum bewafaa hargiz na thhe, where one might get the sentiment, but what of the great ‘tribal’ scatting in the background? Even the reliable smriti.com does not offer the ‘words’, let alone their meaning. But Malgonkar writes, ‘I have taken absolutely no liberties with the plot, done my best to incorporate the changes made while the film was being shot, and have left much of the dialogue of the screenplay as it was.’ So he has. More’s the pity that the novel is nowhere to be found.)

So what will be the fate of this book? How many will it speak to, how effectively and for how long? How much of the experience that is popular cinema in India does it capture?

While I was trying to communicate some element of Helen’s magnificence for Helen: The Life and Times of an H-Bomb, I remember the struggle it was to describe what was going on in a single song. There she is ripping her clothes off with her teeth. No, now she’s running up the tongue of a cage. Now the putative hero of the song has appeared over the horizon of the stage. And should I now consider the lyrics or the moves or the background? And then again, what of the props and the costumes—the plastic flamingos, the gilded cage, the man in the traje de luces of the matador? I struggled, I did my best. Maybe some of my readers remembered what I was describing; they might have started to hum as they read: Piya tu ab toh aaja … If they did, the words had worked. But more often, words, fixed on a page, can only fail. Describing a scene in a movie can never work unless it is a mnemonic device.

For Hindi films go deep into us. They allow us to play a number of roles, to prefigure them. They offer us a vocabulary for the moments that are too deep—or sometimes too improbable—for language. When we use a phrase from a Hindi film song, we can express heartbreak, betrayal, aimlessness, and, at the same time, we can put a little distance between ourselves and what we are saying. By using popular culture, we ease away from the strain of self-expression, while reminding the objects of our desire or distress—or even all the world—of what we are actually feeling.

This book, then, is a celebration of all that Hindi cinema has done for us. Its editor believes that it must be eclectic because Bollywood at its best was eclectic. It had no time for your past or for your caste; it only cared about your saleability. It was secular because it paid to be secular. It was patriarchal because it paid to play to mainstream values. This book hopes to reflect that identity: all-inclusive, opportunistic, outward-looking,

This book’s uses will be manifold, I am sure, but its illuminations will be incidental. It is meant for the satsang of the cinema houses. Some of the nation’s best film writers and some of its best fiction writers are represented. Many others could not be included for one reason or another. This is my fault.

For the rest? I lost it all at the movies.

JERRY PINTO
Mumbai